Umm... You know they have been working on this for like 8 years?
I gave up waiting four or five years ago. Did not think I would ever see the day me playing Black Mesa.

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Agreed. Also, the gameplay is expected to be around 8-10 hours, with little to no replay value. There's no way it was worth the wait even if it's a grade A job. Oh well, at least it will be free.

Similarly, the same logic applies to HL3/EP3 from Valve, but even more so, because they'll charge for it, so it better be something truely epic to make it worth the wait. I don't think any game could scale to such heights to compensate for the wait after being in development hell for so damned long.

Mind you, they did alright with Duke Nukem Forever, didn't they? Kidding, I never waited for it, lol.

Agreed, but damn, come on, free or not, why is it taking so long? It gets very frustrating and does make people feel jaded, me included. It's reasonable that people will want to vent a bit about it.

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Why it takes so long? Well it takes at least 2 years to professional developers to make games, real good games take 5. That's 20+ (nowadays 100+) people working 8 h a day. This is a mod, they are not paid, they can't devote 8 h a day to making it (for the sake of sanity) and I doubt they were 20 people, more like 10.

I've been involved in mod development. It's fun, until it becomes too serious (is there anythng more serious than making a remake of HL1??), internal "deadlines" are set, and there's high expectations (quality expected everywhere), etc. Then it becomes a nightmare. It's your free time and instead of playing or being with family members, you have to spend a significant amount of time, doing the exact same thing you do on work, with deadlines and expectations that resemble way too much your actual work, despite suposedly being a hobby. No one really sets these expectations and deadlines, other than you yourself and your partners, but at this point you do feel like you HAVE to go through all of that, because there's people waiting for the mod and you want to succeed and finish it. In comparison to BMS, it was a very small mods I was involved in for HL1 and UT, and the audience was very very small, I can only imagine the nightmare that the BMS team has gone through.

So no, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize their work in that manner. I'm mostly talking about midget here tho (no offense). I think it's reasonable to ask when it's going to be released, etc. But to complain about the quality or the gameplay and whatnot... I think it's essential to first ask yourself if you would go through all of that, and how much of your life would you be willing to devote to it, before even commenting on the issue. It's taken them 8 years, yeah, "wtf I had to wait 8 years", right? No. Read the above paragraph again and think of it from their perspective, yeah, it's been 8 fucking years!!! Be grateful or stfu ffs... (again no offense to anyone)

Why it takes so long? Well it takes at least 2 years to professional developers to make games, real good games take 5. That's 20+ (nowadays 100+) people working 8 h a day. This is a mod, they are not paid, they can't devote 8 h a day to making it (for the sake of sanity) and I doubt they were 20 people, more like 10.

I've been involved in mod development. It's fun, until it becomes too serious (is there anythng more serious than making a remake of HL1??), internal "deadlines" are set, and there's high expectations (quality expected everywhere), etc. Then it becomes a nightmare. It's your free time and instead of playing or being with family members, you have to spend a significant amount of time, doing the exact same thing you do on work, with deadlines and expectations that resemble way too much your actual work, despite suposedly being a hobby. No one really sets these expectations and deadlines, other than you yourself and your partners, but at this point you do feel like you HAVE to go through all of that, because there's people waiting for the mod and you want to succeed and finish it. In comparison to BMS, it was a very small mods I was involved in for HL1 and UT, and the audience was very very small, I can only imagine the nightmare that the BMS team has gone through.

So no, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize their work in that manner. I'm mostly talking about midget here tho (no offense). I think it's reasonable to ask when it's going to be released, etc. But to complain about the quality or the gameplay and whatnot... I think it's essential to first ask yourself if you would go through all of that, and how much of your life would you be willing to devote to it, before even commenting on the issue. It's taken them 8 years, yeah, "wtf I had to wait 8 years", right? No. Read the above paragraph again and think of it from their perspective, yeah, it's been 8 fucking years!!! Be grateful or stfu ffs... (again no offense to anyone)

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Thanks man, that's a great explanation.

As you say, a mod is one thing, but here they're recreating the whole game, a different ball game.

On top of all this self-sacrifice, they'll never even get paid for all that effort! I have to admit that I wouldn't be motivated to finish something as big as this in my spare time for no financial compensation. Fuck it.

Given all this, I can see why it would take forever to finish. In the light of all this, it's not such an unreasonably long time to wait for it. I'll certainly be making my PayPal donation for this.

I will download this game and enjoy it...
Late or not WHATEVER! right...
I was watching the videos of the testing and I see how much work they put into this...I bet it will be fun and I also don't think we'll ever see a HL3 or HL2 ep3

Personally I think that one of the biggest hold-ups was probably them waiting for "HL2: EP3" to see if they would re-visit "Xen" so they could match their designs, especially since they are only releasing the chapters up until the last four; "Xen", "Gonarch's Lair", "Interloper", and "Nihilanth" are still in-development.

As you say, a mod is one thing, but here they're recreating the whole game, a different ball game.

On top of all this self-sacrifice, they'll never even get paid for all that effort! I have to admit that I wouldn't be motivated to finish something as big as this in my spare time for no financial compensation. Fuck it.

Given all this, I can see why it would take forever to finish. In the light of all this, it's not such an unreasonably long time to wait for it. I'll certainly be making my PayPal donation for this.

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Actually that's not true. It takes long to develop a game from scratch. You have to first outline what you even want to do, concept images, concept graphics, game plot, problems during development, decisions during production etc etc. Things can go as far as how green should the grass be or should commandos soldiers have green camo or the grey urban camo.
All this can accumulate loads of work time.

In case of Black Mesa, they had everything done already, they just had to remake it. Which still requires time, granted, but nowhere near as much as doing it from scratch.